UK's Royal Mail workers call off 24-hour strike, union says

Mon, 6 February 2023

A postal worker makes a delivery in London


(Reuters) -Postal workers at Britain's Royal Mail called off a planned 24-hour strike over pay next week after receiving legal challenges by the company, the Communication Workers Union (CWU) said on Monday.

Lawyers have advised that the union could defend its position in court, CWU said in a statement, but it added that the risk of losing in court may potentially impact a new ballot.

"The laws of in this country are heavily weighted against working people," the union's lawyers said, adding "the risks of losing in court may potentially impact on the re-ballot – we simply cannot allow this happen."

The union, which represents more than 115,000 postal workers at Royal Mail, will also re-enter negotiations with the Royal Mail Group this week, the statement added.

The CWU had served a notice to Royal Mail Group for a 24-hour strike for all shifts starting after 12:30 p.m. on Feb. 16.

Royal Mail did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.

With inflation running at more than 10% - the highest level in four decades - Britain has seen a wave of strikes in recent months across the public and private sectors, including health and transport workers, Amazon warehouse employees and Royal Mail postal staff.

(Reporting by Jyoti Narayan in Bengaluru; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Stephen Coates)

Royal Mail faces threat from ransomware group LockBit


Tue, 7 February 2023 

Illustration shows displayed CYBER SECURITY words and binary code

(Reuters) -UK's Royal Mail is facing a threat from ransomware group LockBit, according to information published on a website, at a time when the British postal and parcel firm is grappling with the fallout of a "cyber incident" from last month.

LockBit has said it would publish stolen data on Feb. 9 if Royal Mail failed to pay a ransom, a screenshot of the group's blog on the dark web on darkfeed.io, a website which tracks ransomware groups, showed.

TechCrunch, earlier in the day, reported that Royal Mail was added to LockBit's dark web leak site this week and the group was threatening to publish "all available (Royal Mail) data".

In an emailed response to Reuters, Royal Mail said evidence from its investigation so far suggested that the data allegedly obtained from its network did not contain any financial information or other sensitive customer information.

LockBit was behind a ransomware attack that hit ION Trading UK recently.

Ransomware is a form of malicious software deployed by criminal gangs which works by encrypting data, with hackers offering the victim a key in return for payments. Such ransom demands can total millions of dollars.

Separately, Royal Mail said on its website that the disruptions to its international services due to the cyber incident were continuing and only some of the services have been restored.

Royal Mail said its teams were working to reinstate the remaining export services, adding that its import operations continued to perform fully with some minor delays.

The company reported on Jan. 11 that its international export services were severely disrupted by a cyber incident.

(Reporting by Aby Jose Koilparambil in Bengaluru and James Pearson in London; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Sriraj Kalluvila)